The alternatives to Microsoft Word just keep on comin’. FocusWriter, Judoom and LibreOffice all jump to mind as lightweight choices for people who want to focus on writing rather than formatting. And now, here’s another editor I quite literally found and think is pretty damn sweet – Kingsoft Writer 2012. In fact, this program reminds me of the greatness that was Word 2003.

In looking for word processors to try out I was lead to Kingsoft Writer. The name didn’t strike any sort of chord, but I decided to check it out. What I found was an editor that could and should be a replacement for Microsoft Word. It has all the features such as Styles, formatting, spell check, multiple documents open separate tabs, rules, guides, page layout, fonts, templates, tables and far too many features to list here. As soon as it starts you’ll swear you’re in Word, but it loads in a fraction of the time and has a minuscule hard drive footprint in comparison. It even loads and saves your Word documents so you don’t lose anything there.

Even though Kingsoft Writer has all the features of Word, they don’t get in the way of actually writing something. The editor is clean and simple and you don’t feel overwhelmed by the need to undo formatting choices or make document decisions. You get a blank canvas to work with in a simple, clean interface. I really like that.

What’s more, Kingsoft Writer is actually free. This ridiculously powerful editor is actually free. What’s the catch? You can only save in Word 2003 format. But, if you want to get the full version of Writer, they offer the 2012 version for a mere $20. That’s pretty impressive.

It goes a step further though. That’s the standalone Writer 2012. There is a full features Kingsoft Office 2013 which features Writer, Spreadsheets and Presentation. But don’t worry, there’s a free version of that too. You get plenty of time to check out the features and enjoy a faster, more usable word processor.

I don’t know if Writer 2013 comes as a stand alone product. It’s not listed like that on their site so I’m not sure you can just buy one piece of the Office suite. I guess we’ll have to ask and find out.

But again, this looks like an amazing piece of software that takes all the excellent features your really need in a word processor and throws out all the junk. The entire Office download is less than 50MB while in comparison the Microsoft Office download is 1.5-2GB in size. Yes, I know there are more tools in the office bundle, but, OneNote or Word alone is 400MB download. That’s not the install size, just the download size. And we all wonder why things keep taking longer and longer with the computers we have.

Give the Kingsoft editor a try and let me know what you think. Again, this might be another gem for those in a NaNoWriMo state of mind.